Hutton Pleads Guilty To Check Charge

May 5, 1985

E.F. Hutton & Co. Inc., New York, agreed to pay a $2 million fine and pleaded guilty to criminally writing checks for more than it had on deposit at banks, a scheme the government said gave the brokerage interest-free use of up to $250 million a day. But Hutton`s chairman, Robert Foman denied that the actions by some of the firm`s branches amounted to a sophisticated form of ``check kiting`` as Attorney General Edwin Meese III described it Thursday. Fomon said there was no intentional wrongdoing. Hutton, the brokerage unit of E.F. Hutton Group Inc., the nation`s fifth largest investment concern, entered its plea in U.S. District Court in Scranton, Pa., where a grand jury had been investigating the case. Hutton said it agreed to pay a fine of $2 million.

NATIONAL BUSINESS

(BU) A FEDERAL JUDGE in New York gave a group of insurance regulators, brokers, insurance industry representatives and lawyers representing investors until May 15 to come up with a plan to enhance repayment to all who bought annuities from Baldwin-United Corp. About 30,000 Floridians were among the 165,000 people who bought annuities from Baldwin, a debt-ridden financial conglomerate based in Cincinnati that filed in 1983 for reorganization under bankruptcy laws.

(BU) ATLANTIC RICHFIELD CO. said Monday it is getting out of the gasoline marketing business east of the Mississippi River, abandoning its copper and molybdenum businesses and making other retrenchments that will lead to a one- time writeoff against earnings of $1.3 billion this year. (BU) EASTERN AIR LINES has been picked to fly a profitable route from London to Miami that was abandoned last July by Air Florida, the U.S. Department of Transportation said Tuesday. (BU) GOLD AND SILVER both fell. Gold closed Friday at $311.60 an ounce, down $11.40 from a week earlier, while silver moved to $6.165 an ounce, down 14.5 cents.

FLORIDA BUSINESS

(BU) AFTER LEARNING that former Pompano Finance Director Linda Baker lied on her job resume about having a college degree, the City Commission decided Tuesday to request a state attorney`s investigation of her relationship with ESM Government Securities Inc., the securities dealer that collapsed March 4 while holding $11.9 million in city investments. But Martin Jaffe, head of the Broward state attorney`s investigations into public corruption, said Wednesday that any request by Pompano Beach officials for an investigation would be redundant.

(BU) WALT DISNEY Productions broke ground Monday on a $265 million hotel and convention center complex on a small parcel of Disney`s 27,000 acres surrounding the Magic Kingdom and Epcot Center near Orlando. The complex will be the largest hotel and convention project in Florida and anywhere on the East Coast, Disney officials said.